Pack of Strays (The Fangborn Series Book 2) (14 page)

“Danny, what are you doing here?”

“I had a choice of assignments, after you … after I was told you left, so I—”

He must have seen my face, because it was his turn to reassure me. “Yes, I still have my connections with the TRG, but don’t worry. My place, my car—I got them on my own. I know I’m not being listened to, because I checked. I—we’re safe.”

I nodded. If he could trust me, I could trust him. “But why Istanbul?”

“I figured, it was the best choice for me to work on studying Fangborn documents because of its geographic location, the number of cultures that made an impact on the region …” He smiled a little, and shrugged. “I never did learn much Turkish when I was working in computational linguistics, and immersion seemed a good way to pick up the language. Plus, I really got addicted to the food while we were on the gulet in the spring. Speaking of which …”

I laughed. “You know I will never say no when it comes to eating.”

We stopped for some food and water to take with us, got to Danny’s car—a beat-up Renault—and headed out. He turned off the CD player, which was trying to get him to repeat “I would like to go to the party” in Turkish. “Where we going?”

“Um, north and east. Hilly, sparsely populated. An abandoned house.”

He gave me a look. “The GPS doesn’t do visions.”

“No.” I studied the map. Feeling silly, I held my hand over it like a planchette. My finger was tugged down at a location. “Try heading there.”

Danny squinted, shrugged. “Around Pierre Loti? I guess sparsely populated makes sense for a city like Istanbul. There’s a big cemetery there.” He plotted a course.

“Will it take long?” I buckled up.

“Theoretically, it’s not that far, but with Istanbul traffic …”

We found our way through the congested streets of downtown, through neighborhoods that changed almost block by block. I tried to get used to the signs, but the fact that there were extra letters I didn’t know how to pronounce was terribly confusing. And yet, there were cognates, there were street signs that I could read, and eventually I settled in.

Danny made a turn. “What have you been doing to test it? The bracelet, I mean, the new stuff.”

It wasn’t really the time for science, Danny,
I thought, annoyed. “Um, well, mostly I’ve been trying to stay alive. And the thing’s been driving me to find other pieces, to the extent that I am now able to ignore the Call to Change.”

“Wow.” The significance of this was not lost on Danny. “Well, that tells you something. If it is a Fangborn artifact, it has other concerns than evil. If it’s not, it certainly is an effective way of subverting the Fangborn. Have you thought about trying to—”

“Danny, I’ve thought about a lot of things to try to figure this out, including trying to rid myself of this, but what I need most is time. I have absolutely none of that. I’m not sure using a scientific approach will work on what seems to be a magical device.”

He cocked his head in a way that had infuriated a generation of bullies allergic to smart-asses. “What makes you think it’s magic?”

“Well, it has to be.”

“Why? Because it glows? Because it does stuff you don’t
understand
?”

“Well, yeah.”

“Fireflies glow. You couldn’t wire up your mom’s old stereo on a bet. Does that make them magic, too?”

“I suppose you’re right. What’s that quote you like so much?”

“Which one? ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic?’ That’s Arthur C. Clarke. There’s also ‘When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’ Conan Doyle, or Dr. Watson quoting Sherlock Holmes, if you like.”

“There is the lab,” I said slowly. “That’s certainly significant.”

“The lab?” He stopped to let a vendor with a cart full of
si
mit
cro
ss.

I licked my lips, remembering the Turkish “bagels,” then got hold of myself. I explained to Danny how I’d been having visions about an archaeology lab. I hadn’t said anything about Sean yet, and my worries about him. I had to work up to that. “It’s my perfect place, you know? So I think it’s the bracelet’s way of letting me figure out what I’m getting. What I need to do next.”

He nodded. “That makes sense. When you’re in there, don’t be afraid to try stuff. I doubt you’ll do anything serious to yourself, but you might learn a lot.”

I thought about what happened when one of the artifacts … took possession of me. Moved in. Or what happened when I tried to remove the pieces near my neck. Horrible so far, but nonlethal.

I told Danny about the “repairs” and “infilling” I’d done. “Okay. I mean, I guess it’s a little like historical documents or artifacts—not everything’s going to be preserved, right? But … 
apparently
, I can make substitutions.”

“That reinforces the notion that they have a built in redundancy, if you can fit them together like that. Also that you can manipulate them to a certain extent.”

“So far, I can only manipulate them to do … what they want. To be better at what they’re doing.”

“But maybe, with time, you’ll get better at this,” Danny said.

It was probably his skills with computers and code that made me think of it. “Maybe I can hack them. Eventually.”

Coming up with that idea emboldened me. I took a breath and thought about telling Danny about Sean and his violent
suggestions
.

Then he smiled, and it was the first time I saw something like our old relationship falling into place. It was heartening. I wanted to hold onto that.

I changed my mind again and changed the subject. “What’s getting me, though, is why the Fangborn have so little information about this kind of thing. The Fangborn seem to live in the present, you know? Always going after the next bad guy.”

“It doesn’t foster an environment of reflection, does it? It can’t,” he agreed.

“I only wish there was a way to tell which things were clues and which aren’t, in terms of the history I’ve read or the sites I’ve seen. I’ve been reading up on historical accounts of vampires—you know, there were historically documented cases of ‘vampires’ in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century New England?”

Danny thought a minute as he pulled up a steep hill into a neighborhood crowded with tenements. “Something about tuberculosis, right?”

“Right. There were outbreaks of consumption; the local people were told that the wasting and death of their loved ones was attributed to vampires. The only ways to preserve themselves, and the souls of their beloved dead, was to rearrange the bones or burn the heart. Maybe the whole corpse.”

“That’s pretty awful.”

“Right? But on one gravestone, the word ‘vampire’ was actually used in relation to the deceased’s sickness, something like ‘
Although
consumption’s vampire grasp had seized thy mortal frame.’ The word ‘vampire’ showed up in newspapers.”

“Okay,” Danny said. “So your question has to be: Were there really vampires there?”

“Right. I mean, I know it wasn’t Fangborn vampires responsible
for the deaths. They don’t feed on humans. But perhaps
Fangborn
vampires were there, trying to help them, heal them. So maybe between that, and the wasting illness, some idea of
vampires
, however misguided, entered into the story. Because of their presence, not because they were responsible.”

He nodded. “I see how it’s hard to untangle. There’s clear
archaeological
and historical evidence for the
idea
of vampires, but one we know is absolutely not true.”

I squinted at the road sign, glanced at the GPS to make sure we were still heading in the right direction, not distracted by our discussion. “Right. Pictures of unicorns and sailors’ references to sea monsters does not make them true—but it does seem as though the Fangborn should have some better way of finding ourselves in our history. There’s never a precise correlation.”

“So you’re going to have to look at it from the artifacts and work backward. See if the history gives you any clues once you learn about them. And the more you putter around in the lab, the more you’ll learn.”

“I’m going to have to be bold with what I try in there.” It was a good solution, the only one available to me, and it scared the
willies
out of me.

Danny glanced at the GPS. “In about another mile, it gets hilly.”

“That sounds right.”

“Why are there always hills?” Danny frowned. “Some kind of hero thing? Climb the hill, slay the dragon?”

“Nah. Most likely a vantage-point and security thing. Easier to protect something where you can see enemies coming.”

“Great. Can’t we have the thrilling heroics
with
mod cons? You sure we can’t take the scenic tramway?”

I waved away the thought dismissively. “Trams are for tourists.”

It turns out our destination was close to the tourist spot Pierre Loti Café, which had a beautiful view of Istanbul. Danny told m
e tha
t, historically, the area had been part of a small village outside the city walls of Constantinople, and while it was a
thriving
area filled with markets, mosques, and throngs of people, the
secondary
road we parked on was nearly deserted. A small house,
falling
into ruin, was at the top, surrounded by other buildings, all in need of repairs. It was as if my destination had blighted the street, and it was unusually empty.

“Look,” I said as Danny stretched, “I don’t think you should go in there.”

“How about if I go as far as the outside?
I
don’t like the idea of
you
being alone for that long.”

“Okay, but …”—I remembered the “earthquake” I’d experienced in Roskilde, and did not want something equally turbulent happening here—“just be ready to run.”

As I climbed up the street, I felt a growing certainty I was in the right place. It didn’t match any of the visions I’d had in Ephesus, not the way the house in Roskilde did, but the idea of the place, the rightness of it, sort of settled into my mind as solidly as those had. Just as my Moorish friend had said, the artifact had been moved. The “rightness” intensified at that thought, letting me know I was on the right track.

The front door looked ordinary, but as good a way to get in as any. “Right,” I said. “I’m going in. You hear anything, you get the hell out.”

Danny nodded and touched my shoulder, taking a seat on an overturned crate.

The door grated on its hinges, echoing in the empty space. The front room showed some footprints. Dust had been disturbed, a path leading to a staircase. That wasn’t my way. I moved as quietly as I could to the door opposite and opened it.

The room was utterly empty. Not the sort of room I expected to find in a traditional town house, it was too shallow and too long. It looked as though a partition wall had been put up in the middle of the old room. The new wall was fresh white plaster and much more recent than the rest of the house. A door in the middle of that new wall beckoned.

As soon as I touched the doorknob, the bracelet’s stones were blazing color, like they’d become alive, animated, eager, encouraging me to go on. I soon saw why.

On the wall opposite the opened door was a mosaic. A
geometric
pattern of optical illusions, what appeared to be cubes expressed in two dimensions. Simple, elegant, mathematical. A classical design in black, red, and white.

This
had
been moved, at least once. It appeared as though the entire floor had been taken, for the new plaster of the wall surrounded the mosaic like parts of its original floor.

The stones of the bracelet were now lighting in a sequence too fast for me to follow. The tesserae of the mosaic were doing the same thing. Exactly the same thing. The geometric pattern was gone, and the individual tiles were echoing the pattern on my bracelet, down to the colors. No longer only black, red, and white, the stone tiles took on every shade of the rainbow.

There were places that briefly went dead on the mosaic, parts that didn’t match the flashes and lights of the bracelet. All the remaining activity was an exact reproduction.

They were trying to communicate. I wasn’t even touching the panel, yet I was on the edge of understanding. Something rippled deep in the base of my brain, and a chill went through my body. If only I had a way to record what was going on; if only I could feed the information into a supercomputer, with a team of—

A rocket flare, fireworks in my brain. I didn’t need to look up—it hit me even before the scent reached my nose.

Someone was about to attack—

If I hadn’t been a werewolf, I would have been dead. A footstep, a metallic hateful snap of a bullet into the chamber, a whiff of something foul—I don’t know what it was. I was turning and
ducking
before anything registered in my consciousness.

The first bullet missed by a foot; the second, by a little more.

I kept moving around and toward him. He kept moving, too, but nothing can keep up with a pissed off werewolf unless it’s another werewolf.

I swear I could hear the third shot whisper my name and brush my hair as it passed.

I felt the Change overtake me as I leapt. I heard the
whmp-whmp-whmp
of a suppressor, more bullet whispers.

A burning bite in my shoulder, bright pain, bitter blood, and black rage. The eighth bullet had caught me in my shoulder as I landed, knocking my attacker back. I followed, and with both hands, I twisted his wrist until I wrenched the pistol away from him. He snarled as his hands let go, and I belted him upside the head with the still-hot pistol. He managed to land a roundhouse to my temple, and I shot him in the leg. He screamed, clutching his leg. I smiled.